Long Journey's Arielle Zuckerberg on betting early on the weird — from robotic eyelash extensions to deep tech robotics

made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising. Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is in the reream waiting room.

And as a benefit of reream, we got our first commenter on LinkedIn, I believe. Let's go. The chat is just blowing up. We have chatters on the Open TV here. I see folks on YouTube. Thank you. You are live on TVPN. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Woo. Uh, feeling good. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Do you remember meeting me? We met in near Stanford like a decade ago with Anker Jane who now runs that amazing fintech built. Built. Yes. I am Am I misremembering that? Do you remember this? I think we met years ago with anker. This is when I was at human. Yes. I think so. Okay. Awesome. Good to see you again.

Good to see we're back. Uh how how would you describe uh where you are right now? Give us the intro. Introduce yourself to the to the to the folks who are watching. I am a general partner at Long Journey Ventures.

Uh we're a preede and seed stage firm and our core thesis is that we think the biggest companies of tomorrow will look really weird at the preede and seed stages. And our our mission is to be the second believer in the magically weird. There are so many weird things in the portfolio. We had Cyan and Lee on the show.

Uh what was it a couple months ago talking about the the diamond company, the cloud seating company I believe is in the portfolio. There's just weird stuff all over. What else is in the portfolio? And of course Justin Justin is a close friend, venture partner.

He's always he's always investing in weird silly things and then like five years later they're they're deckorns. Yeah, totally. Um, did they mention the robotic eyelash extension company? What? No. What's that? Explain that to me. Oh, yeah. Um, it's a robot that applies eyelash extensions.

Instead of taking an hour or hour and a half for a human to do it, the robot can do both eyes at the same time. It takes 15 minutes. That sounds high risk cuz if if the robot like flinches, it just rips your your your eyelashes out. Well, that's why they invented the anti-flinching technology. There you go.

There you go. patented. It doesn't flinch. I mean, humans flinch, too. So, it's not it's not it's all high risk. It's true. Superhuman unflinching AI. This is the this is going to work. Um yeah, I think I think we I I I'm glad you guys do this.

Uh you know, obviously, I mean, it it seems like the the rest the rest of the partnership, we've we've had them all on the show and I'm there's not enough people that are just like actively trying to find the weird stuff, but like you guys act do it consistently.

A lot of people say they want to find the weird stuff and then it just winds up being a lot of B2B S defense tech whatever's on trend whatever's on trend. Okay. We we do quite a bit of defense tech too but I think we were doing it back when it was weird or taboo for sure. I mean one of the first role Yeah. Yeah.

Uh is there something to the now contrarian statement that occasionally you want to do consensus investing and you want to be the momentum trader? Uh it's certainly paid off for people in AI over the last few years. I I can you at least see the the value in that? Oh, for sure.

I know we have a we have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance on the team because so many talented builders are are building in AI. Um we want to play the game that's out on the field. Yeah. Uh so we but yeah, it kind of like hurts our souls when things feel consensus. Uh and it's a question like are we too late?

Yeah, because I mean we feel like the best time to invest in seed and preede is when things feel absurd or or non- consensus and we want to we want to invest before they become consensus. That's where the alpha is. Yeah.

What's the uh uh what's in uh internally like your feeling on like the AI hype cycle uh where we are? It feels like it's been like punishingly dominant for the last few years. Um it are you over expectations are inflated. Are there pockets of optimism? How are you seeing kind of the overall AI boom?

Uh Sam Alman recently said we might be in a bubble. Um which is kind of a crazy thing to say. Uh but who knows maybe he's having fun. Uh what what is your current thesis on like opportunity within AI?

Yeah, I mean we like to think of like the second order effects and especially um have been looking more towards deep tech. Sure. And the implications and and how AI creates a tailwind for deep tech companies uh you know robotics, biotech, etc.

Um because we feel like you know working in those spaces there's a lot of defensibility in doing something that's really hard. So that's kind of how we're we're thinking about it. How uh where yeah how do you dial in like um the the opportunity there? Obviously, you have like big companies.

I mean, Tesla just put out this big the fourth master plan uh going into humanoids. It seems like it's a it's an incredibly expensive place to play. But then, you know, we we we just had a friend send us a a new Roomba that is just like a a new a new friendly robot vacuum cleaner.

And it seems like I mean, it's a fantastic product. I'm not exactly sure how the business is doing, but it seems like a fantastic. Um and uh and and and those are like two like wildly diver diverging opportunities. What are you seeing that's kind of interesting in uh in the deep tech AI enabled like AI tailwind world?

Yeah, I mean we're looking at everything across robotics because I mean there just the ability to train robots because of LLMs and physical AI.

Uh I mean it's just gotten so much faster and easier which has you know the the cost of training robots to do something that's actually creating value has just gone down immensely.

So that is one of the tailwinds that we think has enabled you know we've invested in companies you know doing case picking and distribution centers uh you know we've invested in robotic eyelash extensions you know there there you know many many applications of of robots we've looked at a lot of you know inhome robots I'm not 100% sure how people will feel with a humanoid like figure in their home.

Um I mean I don't I don't know if I personally want that, but Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On on that, do you think that um we're learning anything from the the uh the reception of the like AI companionship to how robots will be uh like received in the home?

because I agree with you um that having a robot over there that's in my house seems maybe a little black me or a little odd but at the same time I also would never have predicted that you know millions of people would be uh complaining about chat GPT40 going away because they saw it as a friend and a coach and then you know Elon's going into the romantic space and there's like all these different areas where it seems like people are actually you know incredibly receptive to having a personal relationship of whatever kind with the robot.

Uh do you think there's something we can learn about that or from that? Absolutely.

I mean I am definitely reserve the right to change my opinion over time but I think today it would be creepy and black mirroresque and I am much more into the idea of like ambient you know singlepurpose objects doing a doing a task like something that lives in the laundry room you know moving your laundry or folding your laundry and you know that can be one thing that lives there and then I will have another thing that lives elsewhere and I I think like ambient robots, but not, you know, necessarily rosy.

I completely agree with you. And yet, I can immediately imagine the Black Mirror scenario where my laundry robot is like, "John, I' I'd like to actually go trim the trees today. " Like, you know, or I figured out a way to I figured out a way to run the laundry with the door open and I'm going to flood your home.

We had we had we had somebody on the show that that makes a like a a bedroom lamp that can fold your laundry. It was the exact tal that I love it. But the but the thing is you could easily imagine the Black Mirror scenario where the lamps just start, you know, killing you.

Yeah, it really lent itself to the dystopian world. But how do you how do you guys um talk about uh like timelines?

Because something that stood out to me from conversations with Lee and Justin and I know you guys are talking all the time about deals is they're willing from my sense is they're willing to invest in a founder and and be okay with them like going and just wandering and tinkering for a long period of time and there's less of this pressure of like okay we're leading your seed and then you're going to sprint to the A like hopefully later this year.

Can you do the seed and cruso or something like that? Wasn't that Yeah, this crazy deal. Like I mean I think it would be rough if we were named long journey ventures. Oh yeah, but you have to get to the series. Long Journey short time horizon. Get to the this year or actually medium journey.

Yeah, we pump more money in this thing. Um but yeah, I mean uh like unpack a little bit more about like is that just matching finding the right founders? Is it a specific vibe that you bring? Is that like not taking a board seat, taking a board seat, coaching the founder? We do not take board seats.

Yeah, we do not typically take board seats. And yeah, I think sometimes, you know, when you're investing in the absurd before it becomes consensus. Sometimes you whiff you whiff it, of course.

And you know, it's just a matter of talking that through with the founder and usually the founder realizes it even before you do.

And so yeah, we have quite a few companies that end up pivoting and renavigating the idea maze, but uh but yeah, sometimes it lands and then you're one of the earliest investors in something incredible like Crusoe. So yeah. Yeah. What a crazy crazy part for the course. Yeah. Um yeah.

What h how have you been processing the uh all all the news about like uh Jevans paradox and like the uh the the token costs coming down but then companies using more expensive models and maybe this is going to hurt margins and whatnot?

Like did you did uh did you go through the same roller coaster ride that most people did during like the deepseek moment or how how are you how are you processing the overall uh temperature of like how the the the latest trends in the AI models just affect like the the companies that are actually building on this technology day-to-day?

Yeah, I mean I think the cost reductions are obviously extremely significant and and I think you know people right now a lot of enterprises are in the kind of pilot or experimental phase where I think they want to use you know the highest performance models based on the academic benchmarks but I think cost reduction or you know the cost profile will really come into play when people want to start deploying you know AI companions to all their employees or you autonomous background agents uh you know these sort of deployments across many workloads that will consume a lot of tokens then I think costs will really matter.

Yeah. So I think that's that's kind of like what I'm looking out for is uh you know not just increases in performance but how these cost reductions will enable you know scaling more use cases. Yeah. Yeah. We we were debating notion earlier.

Ivan said that uh these gross margins went from just just scraping by at 90% and now it's down at 80%. And uh to to to me it seemed it seemed like a trade I'd take all day long for for growth and a better product and something that's AI enabled.

Uh of course you got to build the right the right product in there, but it seemed like uh seemed like a no-brainer and that's probably why he's he's uh talking to Chris Mims at the Wall Street Journal. Uh definitely. Yeah. About it. It was interesting. And then I think like the sentiment has been interesting.

It almost feels like the general reaction or like the Gen Pop reaction to new models is that we're almost in like the iPhone era. I mean, I remember when people used to wait in line, people freaked out about like new iOS releases and and new iPhone releases.

And now people are like kind of deeply ambivalent about whether they're they're going to get the new iPhone or not. But um it almost feels like the public feels like we're in that spot with a the newest AI models.

But I feel like that that misses the picture on the the cost reduction side, which I think is really powerful. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting.

Doesn't uh I mean, this is why so many people are so bullish on on chat GPT and OpenAI despite all the chaos and competition is is you go walk to the average person down the street. have you tried any AIs? They'll say, "Yeah, I've used chat GBT. It's cool.

" And then if you go to those same people and say, "Hey, I have a something like chat GBT. It's it's twice as good. " They're going to tell you, "Okay, like I don't know. I don't know what that's really going to do for me. " So, uh, yeah, it's it felt like six months ago we were in this era again.

It was like the early iPhone days, like you said, where it was like, "Oh, a new model came out. Let me rush to try it. " And now there's way less of that that energy. So yeah, totally. It's good for the uh the new incumbents.

We were talking to Mike Maples about this uh at the early stage uh like like the this analogy of like uh finding good lakes to fish in for um outside the box thinkers, entrepreneurs that might be up for a long journey. They might wander for years.

like uh where are where are some of the underrated places where you're seeing pockets of entrepreneurial talent uh bubble up like there years ago it was like you know uh like the the PayPal mafia was like a massive explosion of like just back all those companies they're huge uh the same thing happened with other other big tech companies that threw off a ton of talented entrepreneurs there was like the invest in every Stanford grad phase is there's, you know, get kids to drop out of college to do startups like where where are the interesting pockets of entrepreneurial talent that you're seeing just across the globe?

You know, we're just, you know, waiting outside YC demo day. No kidding. Uh we have partnered with a really cool organization. I am really excited about where they're going. It's called Edge Institute and they run these monthly Yeah. monthly pop-ups called Edge Esmeralda.

They're about to do a monthlong one in Patagonia. They did one in Helsburg back in June and it attracts a lot of weird thinkers. It's not all founders. It's a lot of like researchers and you know people who aren't necessarily in the kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem, but it's a lot of people with crazy ideas.

is I mean that's the whole concept is edge edge city people living on the edge doing things on the edge and um operating you know in not necessarily society accepted ways right now but like probably will be consensus in the future. Yeah, that seems like a good good uh pool to fish in.

Just like weird thinkers, academics, just anyone who's like just spending Yeah. They might not be a founder themselves, but they're like, "Hey, my my friend is working on this. " Or maybe they could be crazy idea. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. We we did a residency program uh in in Hilsburg back in June.

And Edge Esmeralda is also building a city, right? Can you tell me about what's the progress there? How's that going? They have bought a site for it and are are pl Yeah. and are planning planning the city itself. Um I'm not sure how how much is public. Yeah, Devon. Yeah, we got to have her on the show. That'd be great.

Yeah, you got to have her on the show. Yeah, Devon Zoo, right? Is that the name? I think that's her last name, I believe. So, yes. Anyway, uh we will get her on the show there. Um, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on great day